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Why NASA’s Kepler Mission Is Toast

Last week, NASA dropped a bombshell that it’s Kepler mission — the greatest planet-finding mission in history — had teamed up with Google’s AI to make a groundbreaking new discovery. Speculation ran rampant as to what it might be. An Earth-like twin? A signal unlike anything else we’d ever seen? Even a hint of alien intelligence, or life beyond our Solar System? Nope. Yesterday’s big reveal was an incredibly mundane announcement: Kepler-90, a star system previously known to have seven planets, was now found to have eight. While this makes Kepler-90 the only star system known to have as many planets as our Solar System, this mundane announcement highlights just how thoroughly the data from Kepler has been examined. Despite the headlines you’ll likely see in the future, bet on this: all of Kepler’s major discoveries are in the past.